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Monthly Archives: November 2012

A lot of people continue to see things in Bishop Daniel Jenky’s statements regarding the Health and Human Services contraception mandate that aren’t there.

For instance, the head of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria said in a statement earlier this year that President Obama, due to his imposition of a mandate for employers to provide contraception coverage to employees, was going along the same anti-Catholic road as Otto von Bismarck, Georges Clemenceau, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The secular press headlines and stories, of course, screamed that Jenky was comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin. In one sense, he obviously was, but it was specifically in those dictators’ treatment of the Catholic Church or opposition to it. He wasn’t accusing Obama of engaging in genocide or political murder.

Notably, the mainstream media stories focused on Hitler and Stalin. Oddly, none of the headlines mentioned Bismarck or Clemenceau, although a blogger named “Padre Steve” offered his criticisms of Jenky’s references to them.

Then last month, in a new statement, Jenky urged Catholics to vote, but to also “be faithful to Christ and to your Catholic faith.” He had spent a couple paragraphs previous to that basically defining what he believes it means to be faithful to Christ and to the Catholic faith. Whether he was telling Catholics how to vote—against anybody who supports the contraception mandate—is up for debate, but there’s a strong argument that he was doing just that.

However, some liberal media again overemphasized one of his statements, this time a statement he made about Pontius Pilate and “the mob” that called for Christ’s crucifixion:

Nearly two thousand years ago, after our Savior had been bound, beaten, scourged, mocked, and crowned with thorns, a pagan Roman Procurator displayed Jesus to a hostile crowd by sarcastically declaring: “Behold your King.” The mob roared back: “We have no king but Caesar.” Today, Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters who callously enable the destruction of innocent human life in the womb also thereby reject Jesus as their Lord.

According to Eric W. Dolan writing at The Raw Story, that meant that

Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria this week compared pro-choice politicians to the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who oversaw the execution of Jesus of Nazareth.

Actually, I think Jenky was comparing pro-choice Catholic politicians and lay people to those in the mob who were declaring their allegiance to the secular authorities over the King Who was standing before them. They were the ones who rejected “Jesus as their Lord,” as do those “Catholic politicians, bureaucrats, and their electoral supporters” today who support abortion and contraception. Dolan either mistakenly or consciously misinterpreted Jenky’s statement.

The other big hullabaloo over this statement, however, is that Jenky “ordered” all of his priests to read the statement at Masses the weekend of Nov. 3-4.

By virtue of your vow of obedience to me as your Bishop, I require that this letter be personally read by each celebrating priest at each Weekend Mass, November 3/4.

My understanding is that’s a pretty routine instruction, to make sure that everyone at Masses hears what the bishop is saying about an important topic. Anthea Butler, at Religious Dispatches, says Jenky is a hypocrite for making such an order.

Bishop Jenky's overbearing order to his parish priests smacks of hypocrisy. After all, this is the same Bishop who said that President Obama was like Hitler and Stalin.

What? The Catholic Church is an ecclesiastical dictatorship? Who would have ever known that after 2,000 years? If you’re going to make that argument, Anthea, you should have made it a long time ago.

Butler’s attack, though, is more of a desperate slam at Catholic authority and appears to be yanking routine instructions completely out of context for the purpose of criticizing someone making an argument she opposes. It’s a cheap shot, in other words.

That’s too bad, too, because Butler makes some good points about realistic Catholic voting patterns later in the blog post.